Smokin'

Since we had not used the smoker yet this year, atara suggested that one of the things I could try while I was off work this week is do up a meal or two in the smoker. After tossing around some ideas, we settled on pulled pork.
I picked up a pork shoulder yesterday morning, and put it into a salt and molasses brine before I went to bed last night. I hauled the smoker out of the garage after Sarah left for work this morning and let it preheat to 210°. While that was warming up, I rescued the pork from the brine, patted it dry, and applied a rub to all surfaces. Finally I put it in the smoker and set the timer for 6 hours.
The timer was really a formality, since the goal was to get it to 150° internally for the next step in the cooking. Unfortunately, the smoker malfunctioned. For some reason it was not advancing the smoke pucks, so rather than the 2 hours of smoke I was hoping to give it, the pork only got about 40 minutes of smoke from me advancing the puck manually.

The manual advance button worked, so I know the mechanism is fine. Hopefully this was just a software glitch, but I'll give it a test run before I smoke anything else. It's not the end of the world - it would just mean that I could not leave it to smoke unattended since I would need to be around to advance the pucks. In any event, the 40 minutes proved to be enough smoke, giving it a light, rather than a heavier smoke signature.
Once the meat reached the temperature goal, I wrapped it up in foil and threw it in the oven at 300° until it hit 200° internally. I was a little concerned by that last once since you usually only cook pork to about 160°, but the recipe was specific on that point. I am guessing that the extra heat was to help break down connecting tissue and make the pork easier to shred.

I was worried that the pork would be dry after nearly 8 hours of cooking, but after I let it rest for an hour, I unwrapped it and used a pair of forks to shred it. It was far from dry. In fact it literally squirted juice when I first stabbed it with a fork.

We had it for dinner tonight, topped with broccoli slaw in artisan rolls. It was delicious, and definitely made it onto our list of things to do again.

I think that sometimes the best monuments are the ones from which the plaques that explain them have been removed.

Conducting myself accordingly

I mentioned here the other day that I had dodged a bullet with the "voluntary" conductor training at work. It's not that I don't want to learn the operating rules, or even conduct a train, but they've been using managers to fill vacancies rather than hiring more crews. There are people from my office who have been shipped to remote areas of Northern Saskatchewan for weeks on end.

I remoted into my work machine this afternoon to make sure things were not behaving badly while I am on vacation (they were), and I noticed an email from my boss - who is also on vacation.

He said that they are no longer interested in sending me for conductor training. Huzzah! I mean that could be bad too, since it might mean they are looking at me as being too close to the expendable end of the employment scale to be worth investing more training in.

Oh wait, there was more.

It seems they have decided that I'd be better suited for Engineer training instead. He wanted us to respond by end of day if we had any objections to that.

Hang on - recap time.

1) I am on vacation.
2) My boss (also on vacation) sends an email saying they want to send me for engineering training, but if I have any objections then I should
3) Respond by by email before the end of today.
4) I am on vacation today, and he and the Sr Director know that.
5) This is the same Sr Director who told us in no uncertain terms that we were not to do company work while we are on vacation.

Something about this kinda stinks.

Still, it might be fun to get to play with life-sized trains. Choo Choo!